Recovery's new terminology"Disaster tolerant" environment: Going beyond contnuity, recovery

Since 9/11 and the 2005 hurricanes, business continuity and disaster recovery have moved to the forefront of corporate awareness. Not that the 9/11 and Katrina told us things we did not know — but both did help in bringing into stark relief trends in business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) which had been building since the 1990s: Businesses had become increasingly reliant on IT and communication links, while the Internet and, more recently, Web 2.0 were changing the way they interact, collaborate, and conduct business. At the same time, datacenter and communications technologies which enable continuous operations had improved, and they had become more affordable. Bob Laliberte writes that among the painful lessons of 9/11 was the realization in many IT shops that they needed a more robust BC/DR plan. Boardroom-level directors and officers also began to pay more attention to BC/DR, and many made it a CEO-level mandate to improve the survivability of the IT and communications systems.

Laliberte explores these trends and their impact on today’s approaches to BC/DR. The current focus, as we shall see, is on keeping continuity of information access and communications flows. This is why the most prominent new term in the field is “disaster tolerant” environments. We no longer want to “recover” and “continue” — we want to avoid outages and ensure that our systems and services continue running no matter what.